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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Estlor" data-source="post: 5579030" data-attributes="member: 7261">Popping in for a moment on something I read a couple of pages back:The argument was made that Expertise feats are not a math fix because there exists a multitude of other methods - be it charging, combat advantage, or leader power bonuses - to obtain bonuses to attack rolls that continue to expand as you go up in level.  This argument is a fallacy.The mathematical assumption of the system is that you will have approximately a 50-55% chance of hitting a monster at any given point across the life of your PC.  The actual behavior of the system (pre-Expertise) is that your chance to hit diminishes across tiers to the point where, in Epic, you're actually looking at a 35-40% chance of hitting.Combat Advantage, charging, and leader bonuses are supposed to exist to be an ADVANTAGE to the party; they are a tactical bonus that makes it easier than normal to hit a monster.  They were never meant to be a necessity to make the system behave properly.  I mean, really, having to jump through a bunch of hoops just to have a 50/50 shot of hitting a monster?  Yeah, hatching a plot and watching it fall into place its lots of fun, but the game's intent is to reward you for that, not penalize players who aren't clever enough or whose party isn't optimized to each others' strengths.  And no argument you can make invalidates the fact that a baseline PC becomes less accurate over time.  That's what makes it a feat tax.Mandatory?  No.  But, again, that all depends on how hard you want to work for what the system was supposed to give you for free.I have no insight as to why the designers opted to fix the math with a feat, other than perhaps it invalidated the least amount of previously printed material at the time.  I still insist the easiest, most elegant way of doing it would have been to give every PC a flat +1 at 11th and 21st level, such that they end up accounting for 2/3rds of the attack bonus the Expertise feat gives them inherently.  After that, the various situational +1 feat bonus to attack feats that already existed would suffice to finish the problem off.</blockquote>

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